


Oblivion (Never Been A Better Reason)

by Ashling



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Tactile, Touch, brutal and tender at once
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-16 22:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16503638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: In some ways, Eddie is watching Venom watch him die. It's a Russian nesting doll of complications, some kind of mirrored hall where the echoes of their shared body unfold infinitely. Amidst all these echoes, it is impossible to fully hide anything from each other anymore, and Eddie finds this painful and comforting all at once.





	Oblivion (Never Been A Better Reason)

**Author's Note:**

> beta is [snowshus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/profile), much love to them, all mistakes are my own.  
> TW: suicide  
> title & inspiration from [the Bastille song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgXOPeobPcI)  
> this now has [beautiful cover art](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/post/185363038097/so-i-havent-really-drawn-for-ages-so-i-figured) from the extremely talented [picnokinesis](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/)!

In some ways, Eddie is watching Venom watch him die. It's a Russian nesting doll of complications, some kind of mirrored hall where the echoes of their shared body unfold infinitely. Amidst all these echoes, it is impossible to fully hide anything from each other anymore, and Eddie finds this painful and comforting all at once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One moment they're climbing a hilly sidewalk on their way home, body nearly at a forty-five degree angle to the street, sweating from the exertion and still chilled by the late August breeze. The next, they’re knocked onto their back, rolling downhill with some kind of green creature that snarls and snaps a massive bite into their cheek, and then Venom simply takes over. Even as he's being completely puppeted, Eddie can feel Venom's shock of recognition and fear at the smell of the liquid it oozes on them when Venom digs their claws in. For a moment, there is only that fear, and then the creature snarls at them in its own twisted tongue and Venom tears it in two.

"Love, what was that?" says Eddie, when they have finished eating.

**A thing from elsewhere.**

"Like you?"

 **_No,_ ** Venom snarls, and Eddie can feel the terror and rage still pulsing through it, so he says nothing more. He knows very little about Venom’s previous lives for someone so infinitely curious about and intimately connected with the creature, and this is for a reason: he’s always been fairly sure there are things lurking there he does not want to find.

They walk home, body feeling heavier by the minute, and by the time they reach their apartment, they’re so inexplicably tired that they walk straight through the door and drop into the sofa with their shoes still on, into a deep sleep.

 

They dream of nothing but fighting in the dark, tearing creatures apart and eating them still half-alive, the thick ooze on their tongue familiar, overwhelmed with fear and shame and hunger so bad they can feel it almost in their—what are those, fins?

They wake shaken and shivering, and despite the skipped dinner the night before, not hungry at all. One sick day turns into two turns into three, meals intermittent, and sometime over the weekend they realize they haven’t eaten or drunk anything in a good twenty hours.

They down two cups of water they don’t want and microwave some kind of Lean Cuisine TV dinner in a gesture to health, but that doesn’t get rid of the pounding headache.

Venom finally speaks up as they’re staring at the shiny plastic cover of the TV dinner like it’s a code they can’t crack.

 **Its kind was not supposed to exist anymore,** it says. **That was our job, a long time ago. Apparently it did not like that.**

"So..."

**So now its kind does not exist anymore. The job is complete.**

“That’s not...” Eddie closes their eyes, buries their head in their hands. “Venom, what’s happening to us?”

Venom is quiet for far too long before it says, **We will call Dan.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Their first doctor’s appointment is that Monday. It’s congenial; besides being a good friend, Dan has the perfect disposition for a doctor, confident without being cocky, bright and cheerful without being rude to their miserable state. They explain their symptoms, hinting that this may be one of those _more peculiar cases,_ and Dan runs such a massive battery of tests that they know he’s taken the hint. They schedule a follow-up appointment for next Monday to discuss the test results.

On Wednesday, the vomiting starts. Dan fits them into an emergency appointment on Thursday, and they notice his usually good-natured smiles becoming strained. There’s more tests, and the invitation to come back Friday.

Friday, they don’t even try to ride their motorcycle to the hospital. They take an Uber, even though they hate Uber with every cell in their body, and when they get there, they find multiple doctors. They told Dan they didn’t want anyone else on the case, and yet there are not only multiple doctors, but also Annie. (Eddie’s gotten good at calling her Anne when he talks to her, about her, but she'll always be Annie in his head.)

Her presence clearly comes from a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality, but they’re glad of it once things become clear.

It takes a long time for that to happen. There are so many fucking long words and test results and images and then, suddenly, as yet another doctor launches into an endless sentence beginning with _after thorough examination_ , Eddie catches the way that Dan looks at Annie, the way Annie’s looking at him, and it slides into place.

“How bad is it?” they say, a little huskily, not to any of the doctors, not even to Dan.

Annie is not a coward and never has been. She meets his eyes, mouth a thin drawn line, and nods once.

Dan is not a coward, but he’s too kind to be effective, so he sees this and launches into a variety of treatment options. Each treatment is so dizzyingly different from the others that they all provoke more despair and bewilderment than anything like hope. Still, Eddie and Venom are so tired, and they sit and sit and sit under those abominably bright lights with the medical charts and files piling up on the desk before them, until they close their eyes and say, “Annie.”

She makes them all go away, manages the situation as well as she manages all situations, and ten minutes later, she’s driving home in her SUV with their medical papers making a big stack in the shotgun seat and the two of them lying down in the backseat with their eyes closed. It is cool and relatively quiet there.

The respite is brief; when the car stops in front of her apartment, they and Anne have a knock-down, drag-out fight that only ends when they burst into raw coughing. She wants to know what the fuck is going on, but they’re adamant they want to go home, and she drives them home even as she argues all the way, lawyer’s mind brilliant and cruel, ripping open all the reasons they can’t keep fucking isolating themselves from her and anyone else that might give a damn.

But they stand firm. They tell her to help them up into their apartment, and she does, protesting all the way. They’re barely capable of understanding this explosion of their lives, but they know they don’t want her getting caught in its blast.

When Anne deposited them in bed with food and water on the side table and said all she can say, she brushes a stray strand of hair out of her face, out of breath, and just says, “Please.”

For a split second, Eddie almost speaks. But Venom brings his mind closer to Eddie’s, lets him feel the pulsing, trembling waves of pure feeling: **we cannot hurt anyone else today,** it says. **We have done enough.**

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that, can’t bear to even think of what Venom really means, so he gives Annie a lopsided smile. “I’ll call you when I’m feeling better,” he says.

At least Annie can give them a furious look and flee, so Eddie doesn’t have to hear her crying. But Venom has nowhere to go. Llate into the night, they hear endless sounds like screaming, and when Eddie turns and curls them into a ball, presses their hands to their ears, it makes no difference at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On bad days, they can barely move. They mostly try to sleep and eat. Maybe they’ll make a futile gesture towards cleanliness by washing a couple dishes.

Good days are the worst.

Eddie’s consciousness is more fully tied to their body, so on a good day the body has enough energy to travel and Venom has the will to go. They rampage. A good day might look something like this: Eddie says they feel all right, and perhaps they’d like to sit on the sofa for a bit and watch the Conlon Report, see how Rosie’s faring as their replacement.

Venom growls an alien equivalent for _fuck that,_ and before Eddie knows it, they’re in an Uber headed for Drake Pharmaceuticals. Eddie says they can’t fucking do this and Venom says it’s the only choice, there are drugs there and scientists, and Eddie says that if not even Venom’s species could figure out a way to fix this kind of sickness then why the hell should humans, and then they get kicked out of the Uber by the driver, who’s gotten scared as shit by this man desperately hissing at himself.

So then they’re stranded on the side of the road, looking out at the terrifying vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and that’s when Venom says maybe they steal a rocket and go to the original planet of the cursed creature and research a potential cure.

“If I can’t even walk home now, what makes you think I would survive even a fraction of that journey?” Eddie says tiredly. “That would take years. I’d die before we even left our solar system.”

Venom tries to throw an empty van into the ocean. The van barely moves an inch. It screams.

A couple of police officer find them lying down by the side of the road cause they’re just so fucking tired, and then Eddie vaguely recognizes one of the officers and says something about Rosie’s ongoing series on San Francisco homeless policies. He says it blurrily, not even hostile, but one of the questions comes out clear enough to land himself in a jail cell, and then Anne bails them out at the station and drives them home again, still dressed in the green silk gown she was wearing when they called for help and she said she was with Dan at her cousin’s wedding. Eddie talks to her a little on the ride home, but Venom says nothing to anybody, not even Eddie, for the rest of the day, till they return to their usual nightmares.

That’s what a good day looks like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are a lot of good days at first, until a particularly awful one, when Venom’s growling wild schemes and pacing their kitchen and they’re driving each other wild and all Eddie can do is say, desperate, _“Please.”_

Venom drops their body into a chair and they sit in silence for a long time, until Venom breaks it with a surprisingly quiet, **Why don’t you fight us harder?**

“I don’t want to fight,” Eddie says tiredly. “Why are you trying to fight me?”

**Sooner is better than later.**

“But I don’t want to fight.” Venom is silent. Eddie has had enough of that. “Talk to me.”

**It is like this.**

Venom takes them over to the beat-up filing cabinet, rifles through till he finds the newspaper article, yellowed with time but still familiar as the day that Eddie cut it out so carefully and proudly from the Chronicle: _Farmers Sue Monsanto Over Allegedly Carcinogenic Fertilizer_. His first big investigation.

 **They thought it would help them,** Venom says. **They were wrong. They died.**

“It’s not the same thing. Those farmers had no idea what they were getting into. I did.”

**You did not.**

“The day we met, I threw up five times and got shot at in my own apartment. I’ve always known who you are.”

**You still do not even know the name of the thing that has killed you.**

“It doesn’t matter.”

**We knew its name, the day we met. We knew it existed. We knew everything about it.**

Eddie grits his teeth. Venom wants a fight? It’s not getting one. “Doesn’t matter.”

**We knew it might come, one day.**

_“Venom.”_

Venom moves their thumb over the worn paper until it underlines the name of the company whose greed caused so much misery.

**We hate them, as do you. We can feel that you hold hatred for them, even now.**

“Do you feel that I hold any hatred for you?”

 **No,** Venom says, without stopping and searching for it. Eddie has always been more exposed to Venom than the other way around, and if he ever felt such a thing, it would be unmistakable.

 **Perhaps you should,** Venom adds.

“Love, we have enough to deal with as it is. Don’t go hating yourself for something that’s not your fault.”

Venom settles at the endearment, but only for a moment. It’s nothing if not stubborn. **But it is our fault,** it says.

Eddie rubs his forehead, gives up on trying to argue cause and effect, knowledge and consent. This is the kind of shit that Anne and a dozen other lawyers could spend a month on in court and never solve. He’s not gonna convince Venom with nothing more than his own exhausted brain.

“Don’t go hating yourself,” he says. That much he has to have settled on.

 **Why?** Venom asks, and there’s such a bleakness there, so little actual curiosity, as if Eddie couldn’t possibly have anything to say that could mean anything, that Eddie finally snaps.

“‘Cause I don’t want you to,” he says. “And I’m the one that’s dying.”

**Shut up.**

“I am. I’m _fucking_ dying, all right? All right? Can you just—”

The kettle whistles, and they lurch up out of the chair, leaving the newspaper article behind, blinking and holding onto the file cabinet for balance as a wave of nausea batters them.

They’re lucky. They don’t throw up. They make their way to the kitchen, pour out some tea, relish the sudden curl of warmth it leaves in their belly. And Eddie thinks that’s gonna be it, hopes that it’s over, but then Venom speaks inside their head.

 **All of this,** it says, pressing their finger to a yellowing bruise on their knee. (They’re beginning to bruise very easily now.) They wince, grit their teeth against the sensation. **All of this and more on the way. You still call us love.**

“Yeah.”

**It does not make any sense. We are a terrible reason to die.**

“No,” Eddie says. And despite his aching body and Venom’s inability to face facts and their weeklong desire to strangle each other, Eddie’s next words come out plain and true. “There’s never been a better reason.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eddie's throat is sore and strange, feels raw at times from all the coughing, so their communication has gone mostly tacit. There's a subtlety to the language of their shared body that they never had before; where once Eddie moved about as usual, entirely on his own, or else allowed himself to be puppeted entirely like some kind of possessed doll, he now finds even their smallest movements driven by shared will. Venom has found ways to insinuate suggestions of movement before putting its will into it, which is how Eddie ends up doing things like this:

They walk into their bathroom, reach for their toothbrush, and catch sight of themselves in the mirror. Then, despite Eddie's thought that perhaps they might pick up toothpaste and get on with it, Venom wants to linger. Eddie doesn't like to deny it anything these days. He realizes that there is only one thing Venom wants anymore and it's something nobody, not even Eddie, can give him, so he tries to compensate by giving Venom everything else, time first and foremost. Their time, their body.

They look into the mirror, and Eddie feels them together and split at the same time. He has retreated his will, mostly allowing Venom to move their body, but Venom isn't moving much; just looking at their face, Eddie's face, whichever. The thing that is dying. He can’t see his own face in the mirror, only Venom’s, but he can imagine his own face well enough. The face is dull-eyed but not unkind. The face is gaunt compared to what it usually is, but it has the same dark half-moons under its eyes.

Eddie feels them looking intently at the details and tries to think of what those details might be. A fallen eyelash on their cheek, maybe, or the small scar commemorating the time they nearly lost their left eye. It occurs to Eddie that Venom is committing them to memory. It occurs to Eddie that he will live on in Venom's memory across the universe for a long time, maybe forever, and a sudden thought presents itself, unbidden and ugly and clear: _Good. I’ll haunt it. That's almost like being together, isn't it?_

Shrinking from that thought, Eddie suggests they get on with it by moving the toothbrush towards their mouth. Venom acquiesces, and it's an easy routine (toothbrush, dental floss, face wash) until they get to the bathtub.

It was an impulse buy, this tub. They have always been a disaster in every way, filth not the least of it, but Eddie has a few fond memories of swimming as a kid, and when they're done filling it up, bucket by bucket, he likes it best when they hold their breath and slip under the surface, watching the bathroom lights blur into some kind of Impressionist painting, the water warm and comforting around them. It's almost like enjoying the comfort of being asleep while still being conscious, the comfort of being asleep without nightmares.

Today, just as Eddie is sure they're about to slip under, Venom resists, just a little. Not enough to stop Eddie, but then, Eddie's curious, so he lets Venom have at it. For a while, he thinks Venom is doing nothing, and then he realizes, again, that Venom is simply looking. Looking at Eddie's right hand resting on his drawn-up knees, graceless and rather crude-looking, glistening in the bathwater. He wonders briefly if Venom wants to fuck, and he's not against it, but he's so tired, they're so tired, that can't be it.

Venom lifts their left hand out of the water and has them study it just as intently, before it runs the thumb of their right hand over the knuckles of their left. Slowly, like the hills and valleys of bone and skin are some kind of Braille. When Venom reaches that last knuckle, he slides their right hand up along their left arm, pausing once to map the shape of their elbow with their fingertips, and then back up again along their arm, their shoulder, their neck. It pauses their fingertips at the notches of spine at the nape of their neck, sending drops of water rolling down their otherwise dry back. And slowly, slowly, Venom sweeps their eyes along their body, taking in every detail, until it leans their head into the crease of their right elbow, leans that elbow on their knees, and closes their eyes.

This is something that Eddie was not comfortable with for a long time: their eyes closed, their body moving without his will having anything to do with it. There's a vulnerability there that used to make his stomach clench. But they've had their years, and now he no longer has even the smallest impulse to fight Venom's actions. He sits there, shoulders getting cold, toes going wrinkled in the water, as Venom moves their fingertips along their body: the line of their jaw, the slope of their nose, the arch of their forehead. The absence of sight somehow sharpens the shape and texture of it all. It's gentle and sure for a long time, lulling Eddie deeper into sleepiness, and then, unexpectedly, Venom hesitates. Eddie can feel the emotion of the hesitation as much as he feels the physical hesitation in their hand.

Slowly, tentatively, Venom combs their fingers through their hair in long, slow strokes. Eddie wants to flinch at the physical sensation; it's tender and silent and unbearably resonant. Few people have ever stayed with him long enough to learn that this soothes him. His high school boyfriend, lifetimes ago. Anne, of course. But he never told anyone that it reminded him of his mother, the way she used to tell him it was all right to let everything out, the way that for a handful of short years he always had a sure place to take his little griefs and grievances and feel that someone cared for him.

He should be angry. This is not a memory he thinks he's intentionally shared. But for a moment, he focuses on their hand in their hair and feels nothing at all.

Venom speaks inside their head in its very quietest rumble. **We know,** it says.

Eddie begins to cry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a little while, things are quiet and under control in a way that almost lets Eddie believe that he's ready for what comes next.

They’re not entirely cut off from the world, which helps. Annie and Dan are still on their case, having assembled a murderers’ row of specialists, Jack blows up their phone with concerned texts, and even Mrs. Chen calls them once, offering up some horrible man for them to eat. Fuck knows where she found said horrible man. They laugh so hard their chest aches, and they tell her, “Think you’re gonna have to eat him yourself.”

“That’s too bad,” she says.

It is, but she gave a damn enough to call, so that helps.

Jack is a little harder to deal with. They hand in Eddie’s resignation, stating personal reasons. This is perhaps the coward's way out, Eddie acknowledges. Venom thinks they should simply never show up again, but concedes that this would likely lead to a manhunt with a painful resolution. Jack is many things—fiercely intelligent, eternally sleep-deprived, doggedly ambitious—but never a bad boss. He harbors considerable affection for his strangest protege, despite many times they landed him in hot water with studio execs, but they never knew how much affection until they handed over the letter.

They know it's a poorly-written, stiff, dry little note when they write it, but Eddie can't bear to write anything more generous than that, because Jack would surely catch his real reason for leaving if he tries to put even a drop of his true feelings into it.

They have other letters tucked away that Anne will send for them when the time comes. It occurs to them, more than once, that it looks cruel, making Anne the executor of their meager, complicated estate, but they know Anne and Anne knows them, fuck everyone else. She's always been apt to work herself out of any catastrophe she's found herself in, fond of sweat and effort and control, so what better to give her than this? It's a little work and a sign that she's the only one left that they trust all tied up in a slim manila folder.

They make it easier on her wherever they can. Like right now, they're packing up his clothes so she won't have to. The floor of their apartment looks like a thrift store got caught in a hurricane, covered in little piles: plaid shirts, jeans, jackets, things with holes in them that need a little mending, things they should've thrown away years ago.

This, the grey hoodie in their hands, soft and worn and riddled with bullet holes, definitely counts as one of the latter. Eddie feels the flicker of a gentle suggestion from Venom that they smell it, and so they do. They smile. Underneath the faintly musty smell of something left lying about in a drawer for too long, there's still a bit of gunpowder to it.

 _God, they were young then._ It's not so much a thought as a feeling, as visceral as it is illogical. After all, Venom existed long before Eddie, and the particular escape they associate with this hoodie only happened maybe five or six years ago. Still, when they remember it, it's disjointed; Eddie remembers equal parts terror and exhilaration, and Venom remembers a mix of hunger, resentment that Eddie was so caught up in concerns about _collateral damage,_ and a nervous desire to not let Eddie down on that score, even if it thought it was unreasonable.

Even today, a little of that disconnect lingers. That's good, probably; there are memories of other planets that Venom still keeps locked up, creatures fearful and wondrous that he ate alive, more destruction than Eddie would like to have.

This goes for feelings too, though not so much as much as memories. What they feel cannot be hidden, only muted, and even so, Eddie can sense it when Venom's suppressing its sadness. Sometimes Eddie suspects that this is costing Venom more effort than Venom ever lets on. But Eddie leaves it alone; he's grateful for it, really, even if it's a selfish thing to be grateful for.

Now, for instance, the nostalgia they feel is curdled by a swift pang of grief on Venom's part. Even half-hidden, it hits Eddie in the gut, and when he looks up at the empty apartment, at the detritus of his life, he feels terribly tired. In agreement, they abandon the clothes-strewn room and retreat to the bathroom, where they begin to prepare for bed.

In the morning, they’ll go for more tests at the hospital to satisfy Annie, who drives them to every appointment and helps them in and out of the car and never cries when they can see her, for which they are grateful.

The tests continue to confirm what they already believe: nobody will ever know exactly why Eddie is dying. But they’re with her while they’re getting the tests, and that’s something. That helps.

Everything helps, but only for a little while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**We want to go with you.**

"Love, that's not how it works." Eddie takes care to have them speak quietly, partly because their throat hurts with every word they speak, and partly because they can already feel a headache building from nowhere, despite their best efforts, drinking water and lying down with a cold cloth on their forehead.

**How would you know?**

"There's no evidence that you can go with me."

**There is no evidence we cannot.**

"That's not good enough."

**It is good enough for us. It is a chance.**

"No. There's billions of other bodies on this planet, and there will be someone like me, someone you can live with."

**You will not—**

"Someone that'll appreciate you like I do. A good host. We'll find them."

**We do not want to find them.**

"Darling, you can't—"

 **We do not want them!** Venom snarls.

"I'm not—"

**WE WANT YOU.**

_"I can't be the one that kills you!"_

The shout was a mistake. They stumble out of bed and to the sink, coughing so hard their chest rattles, groping in the dark for a cup of water, failing, turning the spigot and just using their cupped hands, ignoring the taste of blood. By the time they're done coughing, Eddie is tempted to let them just fall back in bed and fall asleep, but he gathers up the last of strength, braces their hands on the sink, and looks in the mirror.

Venom looks back.

"I can't be the one that kills you," Eddie murmurs. His throat burns, but if he can mumble a little, hardly moving his mouth, he can still speak fluently enough.

"I don't know how long you've been alive, or even how you were born, or where exactly you came from. But I know—I know of planets nobody else in my species knows about. I know some of the the monsters that have tried to kill you, the years on that fucking comet with only assholes for company, storms that were ten thousand times more powerful than a hurricane, things I can't even put a name to that would have shredded this body of ours without a second thought. When I first met you, I thought you were some kind of hungry kid, but that's not it at all, is it? It is and it isn’t. You're beyond me. You're like—you're the closest thing I've ever met to a god, even if you do love tater tots way more than any god should. Fuck.” Eddie wipes their nose with their sleeve.

“Venom, I'm not even capable of holding my life together on my own. Do you have any idea how many fights I lost before you showed up? Do you have any idea what a wreck I was? You’re the most powerful thing I’ve ever met; I can't be the one that kills you. It doesn't make any fucking _sense_."

His voice cracks. He doesn't try to go on.

**You love us.**

"Yes,” Eddie says, ragged.

**As we love you.**

He can barely speak. "So don't die."

 **Love,** Venom says, **there has never been a better reason.**  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a good day. They’ve hired Pete, their landlord’s nephew, to take them around every now and then. Pete’s easily satisfied and has biceps of terrifyingly circumference, so the arrangement is good. Just now, he’s sitting about half a mile down the trail, while they sit cross-legged on the top of an ugly but glorious sort of rocky hill.

To their north, there’s more rocky hills and strange outcroppings covered in scraggly patches of tough weeds. To their east, there lies a wide view of the city, so small it’s nearly comical, all the self-importance of the skyscrapers drained away by the distance. To their south and east lies a great blueness, ruffled in places and shining serenely.

The warm midafternoon sun feels good on their skin. So little about their body feels good anymore (even sitting, like this, hurts their thinning legs), but this moment, this light breeze ruffling their hair and this call of birds trying to find their mates and this faint warmth like the sun is a presence, yeah. This is good, completely. Eddie can feel the contentment radiating off of Venom.

They sit like that for a long time, until finally the breeze cools a little, the sun’s angling sharper against their eyes, and it’s time to go.

But first, without opening his eyes, Eddie murmurs something that only Venom can hear.

“The ocean, I think,” he says.

In their head, Venom hums agreement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What’s going on?” Annie says. She looks a little rumpled, which for her means total exhaustion, in a beautifully tailored blazer that’s probably seeing its second or third day of work from the look of it. Give it five more hours of sleep deprivation and she’ll be rubbing her eyes, they just know it.

“Just wanted to talk,” Eddie says. Their voice rasps over the words, few as they are. She softens a little at that, sits down on the bed beside them.

“I wish you’d let me have a go at this place,” she says. “You’d cough less if you had less dust around.”

If she stays too long, she’s gonna notice that their legs have mostly stopped working, and that seems like something she doesn’t need to know.

“I know,” he says.

**It doesn’t matter.**

_Stop it,_ Eddie thinks, as clearly and pointedly as he can. Though he expected Venom to be as resentful as this, dreaded the conversation all day. There are few humans whose personality would cause Venom some pause before eating them, and even fewer whose opinion he gives a damn about. Annie is one of these people, and she’s also Eddie’s last shot. So, here goes. He wishes he had time to ease into this, wishes he could leave her with better memories, but their voice won’t last that long and he needs this to work, badly. If he doesn’t do it quickly his nerve may fail him.

Annie’s looking at them like she already knows. Though of course she doesn’t; how could she? They look down at the beige wool blanket across their legs, picking at lint.

“Need your advice for a friend,” Eddie says.

“Yeah? Tell your friend I’m up to my neck in pro bono already.”

“Moral advice.”

“Oh, Eddie. I don’t know if I’m qualified for that. Come on, me. Of all people.” The way she smiles, they can tell it’s been one of those weeks. She’s probably talked to Dan quitting at least three times. But she won’t. They know this about her, and they love that knowledge, but like all other problems, it’s something drifted beyond their reach.

“The most qualified,” Eddie says.

“Flatterer.” She leans back against the headboard. “Go on.”

“He wants his husband to watch him die.”

“Kinky at best, abusive at worst.” Anne says this rather lightly, but her eyes on his face are anything but light.

“He doesn’t have to die. He could live for a long time.”

“You’re serious about this,” she says.

“He seems to be.”

Anne closes her eyes. They can read the tension in her jaw, in the line of her shoulders. Presently, she reaches over and takes his hand.

“Whatever you need, Eddie,” she says. “I’ve understood exactly none of this, but if you need me to be there when you—”

“It’s not me. I’m not talking about me.”

Annie opens her eyes, and looks at them. Really looks at them.

“Well,” she says, after a few minutes, “When I said ‘whatever you need,’ I fucking meant it. But remember I already know that a kiss isn’t mandatory.”

 **Fuck you,** says Venom, sudden and swift and savage.

“Love,” says Eddie, trying to soothe it, and after a moment, the black tendril bursts from his hand, curls tentatively across her palm.

“I can’t keep it forever,” says Annie.

“I know, but you could—” Eddie clears his throat. “You could find it a better home.”

“No, I couldn’t,” she says, at the same time Venom says, **No, she couldn’t.**

“One that will last longer, then.”

“Yeah.” Anne sighs. “I’d wish you’d told me sooner.” But she closes her fingers around the tendril, and it begins moving up her arm, slowly.

“Regrets are for dickheads,” says Eddie lightly. He grips the covers where she can’t see. The slow slide out of him feels deeply wrong, not unlike the first few seconds of lungs burning in the absence of oxygen.

“I did say that, didn’t I.” Anne tries to smile. “But you can’t pin shit on me from ten years ago. If you’re going by the mid-aughts, your fashion choices alone—”

“I take it back.” Eddie’s attempt at smiling has dissolved into a rictus, set teeth. The process has stalled, movement stilled, a part of Venom still in him, refusing to leave.

 _“Go,”_ he growls. It’s a voice not his own, one that makes him cough and hack and when Anne passes over a tissue, it comes away spotted in red.

Venom goes.

Eddie’s lungs feel smaller. His whole body feels smaller, and claustrophobic at the same time, like the room is shrinking but the room is also his body. His throat is suddenly dry and his hands are sweaty and he has rehearsed this in his head a hundred times but he almost doesn’t make it to the last words.

“Don’t come back,” he says.

For a moment, Annie’s entire face and body are obscured by Venom, who tries to make some kind of snarl, but ends up sounding garbled instead, like it swallowed something wrong. Eddie smiles a real smile at that.

“You’ll be all right, love,” he says, to which Venom picks up the side table and throws it through the kitchen wall with a massive crash of plates and splintering of wood.

Eddie closes his eyes until he hears the front door slam shut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To the north, rocky hills and strange outcroppings cast weird blue shadows across each other. To the east, the city is distant and gray, hard to make out in a rain. To the south and east, very close now, right under his dangling, useless legs, the great blueness unfolds, eerily flat, almost artificial-looking. Eddie shivers. He has been sitting here for hours now, ever since Pete dropped him off. He hopes Pete doesn’t get wind of this, hopes Pete goes on thinking that his “other friend” picked him up an hour later and he went to go get dinner in San Mateo and everything turned out fine, just Eddie moved away or something. He hopes his landlord makes up a nice lie about it even though he knows that she won’t.

It’s horribly cold out here, but he didn’t intend to wait long enough to lose the sun overhead. The sky now is very cloudy in a way that makes it seem closer to earth than it normally does, and even though that’s discomfiting, it’s nowhere near as bad as looking down. So he looks up. He keeps looking up. His neck’s got a crick in it. His hands are sore and whiteknuckled from holding onto the rock but he can’t seem to either push off or let go, either.

Despite not having felt a single pang of hunger for practically weeks, it is then that his stomach decides to start gurgling. Eddie stifles the urge to shout in frustration. Starvation was really not the fucking plan.

Then it occurs to him there’s no reason to stifle anything at all, really.

 _“Fuck!”_ he screams.

The sea remains coldly, superbly indifferent.

It is then that he hears a small scuffle behind him. A half-growl.

Eddie rubs his face wearily and tries to pull himself together.

“If you’re a wolf, I gotta warn you,” he says, “Buddy, you’re not gonna want any of this. I’m spoiled meat.”

**You look perfectly edible to me.**

Eddie just about falls off the fucking cliffside, but a couple long dark tentacles shoot out and catch him, and even when he’s on firm ground, he holds onto them for dear life.

A four-legged thing trots towards him and sits in his lap. It looks just alike a small, sandy, flop-eared dog, except for the tentacles. It allows itself to be cuddled, and cried over, and eventually headbutts him in the chest to get some breathing space.

“Poor thing,” Eddie says, wiping his nose with one hand and scratching the dog behind the ears. It whuffles mournfully. “Look at you, all dehydrated. Hm? Did Venom make you climb up here all on your own?”

**It will survive.**

“You shouldn’t have done that to an innocent dog,” Eddie says.

**You should not have visited a California park at night without a coat.**

“You shouldn’t have trashed our apartment.”

**You should not have let me leave.**

Eddie watches as a small black head appears out of the middle of the dog’s back. Between that and the tentacles, it is the strangest, ugliest creature he’s ever seen in his life, and he has seen enough strange and ugly creatures both human and otherwise to populate an army’s worth of nightmares. He has also never been happier.

He has no plan for this, and in this ridiculous, nightmarish alien face, the right thing to do simply slips right out of his head and flies away. Maybe he was sure of it once. Maybe he’s still sure of it. But it’s just not fucking relevant anymore.

“You’re right,” Eddie says.

The slimy head disappears into the dog’s body, and then the whole dog becomes a strange mass of that dark slime, a creature as fully Venom as it can be, nearly twice as big, so heavy on Eddie’s legs that he groans and shifts them. It lays a paw on Eddie’s hand, tentacles out half a dozen tendrils across the back of his hand.

 **Please?** Venom says.

"Come here."

It happens all at once. It’s so overwhelming that for a second, Eddie can’t even see. He hears the dog running away into the underbrush with a yelp, but his other senses are so fully occupied that he forgets it almost as it’s happening.

It’s like plunging into warm water after a long day, or coffee in the morning, or drawing a big lungful of air mid-sprint. It’s like a popped joint settling back into place, or an old scab falling off. But more than all of that, stronger, like the first and last time Eddie ever got high on something stronger than weed, like his motorcycle getting out of control going down a steep San Francisco hill. Like falling, if falling is a good thing.

For a long time, they just sit there, breathing hard. They don’t speak. The sun dips below the horizon.

Eddie doesn’t want to think about any decisions or time or bodies, and that’s fine; Venom suggests they take a rest, and they slowly, painfully lower themselves to the rock till they’re lying curled on their side, which is as uncomfortable as it sounds but also, under these circumstances, the best they can do.

They begin to tell each other stories.

Venom begins with the most faraway thing as Eddie closes their eyes, shuts everything else out, and listens. Venom begins with a new star being born too close, an exodus, a burst pod and a double craft and then things that Eddie can’t even put makeshift English names to, things that Venom tries to share in bursts of concepts and even a few flickering memories. Sometimes Eddie understands and sometimes he doesn’t.

Eventually he too begins to tell stories, memories, little things that Venom has reminded him of, or asked him about. The birthday present he was most excited to get when he was six, a stuffed teddy bear that was twice as big as he was. His first major scar, getting kicked by a school friend’s cow. Getting his heart broken. Getting his arm broken. Getting his heart broken again.

They drift into calmness, talking over each other and with each other and through each other, uncurling a little on the rock, half-asleep really, relaxing for the first time in weeks until their consciousnesses mix and meld, until their consciousness is one long stream of color and feeling, and then at the same moment, they will to open their eyes.

The east wind has cleared the clouds away,  and above them, there are a few of the brightest stars, defying the city smog from the west. The pinpricks of light are so distant and so faint and yet so beautiful that it makes their chest ache. There’s something about the way they can stay the same, and yet change every night. The constancy of remaining throughout millennia, witnessing so much. But even a star doesn’t last forever.

They reach out with their right hand for the edge of the cliff and pull themselves closer till they can feel the edge of it cutting against their side, their thigh. They brace one foot against the side of the cliff and get ready to push.

The surge of thought that comes then is still connected, but flavored at both ends by the two minds. Eddie’s love tastes like relief, like being grateful, like finding something he didn’t think he’d find and doing it over and over again. Venom’s tastes like defiance, like victory, like regretting nothing and wanting fiercely even now. This is joined by half a memory of hurtling up through the air with one tendril round the handlebar of their motorcycle, the rest of them flying free.

**“Now.”**

They close their eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the main things that distinguishes the Eddie and Venom’s story from stories of other people getting superpowers is this: if you look at it in the right light, the story is hardly about the superpowers at all. It’s about Venom and Eddie, the way they find each other and stay with each other, the marriage of their minds. It’s about never being alone, for better or for worse.
> 
> I suppose you might think that death falls under _for worse_. But here in the real world, everyone dies alone, and for all we know, everyone stays alone afterwards too. To me, this death is a fantasy just as much as any superhero battle. It’s a fantasy of affection and togetherness, rather than a fantasy of power and violence. A fantasy about being the one exception. A fantasy about having some kind of a chance.
> 
> This is the happy ending I had to write for myself.


End file.
